


i don't know what to do haunted by the ghost of you

by adelicatepeach



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Freeform, Gen, Mentions of Echo - Freeform, Mentions of Raven Reyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 18:49:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13933107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adelicatepeach/pseuds/adelicatepeach
Summary: Clarke never really leaves Bellamy, even though he knows she died in Praimfaya.





	i don't know what to do haunted by the ghost of you

**Author's Note:**

> This is very loose, stream of consciousness, and unedited as a result.
> 
> Title adapted from Lord Huron.

The first few months in space, he only thinks about her in patches, the few seconds before he falls asleep. They are busy every second of every day, trying to eke out an existence on the ring. There are moments when he wonders why they’re even trying, but he thinks of Octavia underground again, and he doesn’t want to leave her there, wants to get back to her.

Maybe, in five years time, they’ll be better, both with time to grow apart, time to be their own people.

\--

When he does think of her, the ache in his chest yawns wide, and he missed her _so much_ when she left him after the Mountain, but it is nothing compared to how he feels now. Guilt and anger and despair all roil together in his gut, leaving him gasping when he lurches awake at night, thinking of her, thinking of her death. She was alone. They abandoned her.

He sheds no tears for her, can’t find it in him; he is too ashamed that they didn’t wait longer, even though he knows it would have been a death sentence for them all.

\--

After they’ve been on the ring for several months, he thinks of her more often. They’re starting to manage a little better, at least in terms of their day-to-day survival. Although they all have various shifts on the ring, maintaining the fragile ecosystem they’re re-creating, there is actually little enough to do at any given moment, especially compared to the chaos of being on the ground. Instead, they’re often left to their own devices, and at times, it’s grating to have so much free time. He stares out the windows too much, watches the inferno continue to spread until it dissipates; then he stares out at the bleak expanse of earth where they once were. When he can’t take any more of that, he reads, finds an old holopad, and it glitches a lot more than he’d like, but given that he has access to more books than he’s had in what feels like eternity, he’ll take what he can get.

When he falls asleep reading, though, he still startles awake, feels like Clarke is next to him, shoulder to shoulder like they sometimes were, and it takes him time before his breathing gets back to normal.

\--

He doesn’t know how long it goes on for; months, maybe years, but he often dreams of her, hears her voice winding its way through his dreams. He wants to be able to let her go; he _knows_ he needs to let her go, for his own sanity. She isn’t alive. He is complicit in her death. This isn’t like when she shut the dropship door, and he and Finn managed to survive; there is no survival on that planet, unless it’s underground, and there’s no way she could have made it.

She is dead, and he must live with it.

\--

He doesn’t stop dreaming of her. Even worse, sometimes he feels her presence like a phantom limb, standing close to him, looking over his shoulder while he works. He can almost hear her disapproval at times, when he makes decisions regarding electricity or medical supplies that she might not approve of. He can’t physically brush off her concerns or her disapproval; no one else is having phantom visitations from the hundreds of people they’ve lost along the way, and he doesn’t want to hear what people ( _Murphy_ , he thinks with particular vitriol) might have to say about it. Still, even though he knows it’s not real, nothing is real, she is truly a phantom, he takes comfort in the thought of her frustration with him. He takes solace in feeling like she’s within him, even if she’s gone. He thinks of a long-gone poem, thinks _I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart_ , and as much as he still wants to rail against everything that’s happened to them, every thing they’ve lost, every missed opportunity, he also feels like he’s maybe coming to terms with it all.

\--

Harper breaks up with Monty, Murphy and Emori stay together, and Bellamy and Echo circle each other, until one night they sleep together, and it’s not surprising, but it’s not comforting, either, the sharp release of stress and frustration and confinement, and Bellamy likes Echo fine, _trusts_ her now, which is something that he couldn’t have imagined two years ago, but it’s nothing groundbreaking. They lie curled up together afterward, and Bellamy appreciates the warmth of another body next to his, but he still wakes up in the middle of the night, dreaming of Clarke, the way her hair smelled and felt against this face, and he scrubs at his face, looks down at Echo.

He tries to go back to sleep, but he ends up walking around the ring until morning, when he sits across from Echo, reading until she wakes up.

When she does, she raises an eyebrow at him, and picks her shirt up off the floor. “I always took you for a cuddler,” she says, and it bites a little, but it’s nothing he doesn’t deserve.

Still, he shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep,” he replies, attempting nonchalance. Echo’s cutting gaze tells him that she doesn’t believe him for a second, but she comes over to him anyway, stands over him briefly.

“It doesn’t have to be anything,” she says. “But I don’t mind if we do it again.” She walks out, and when he bumps into her later that day, it’s not very awkward, and he thinks that this could be okay.

\--

The dreams and phantom feelings don’t stop. There are days when he’s so irritated that he wishes she would just _go away_ , and in the same breath he feels like collapsing, because she is _gone_ , and how could he possibly want her memory to vanish, too?

He doesn’t seek out Echo on those days; he consciously chooses solitude, and he spends some of his time looking out the window, looking at the destroyed landscape. It hasn’t been long enough to begin to repair; now it just looks like a wasteland, and as much as he wants Clarke to leave him alone, to stop being such a constant presence after what feels like an eon, he also looks down at earth and wishes desperately that she could have survived, that they could have done anything to get her onto the ring.

\--

There are days that he doesn’t think of her, now. He knows what color her hair was, knows what her eyes looked like when she was furious, when she was cold inside. He doesn’t remember what her voice sounded like, but he still feels the whisper of it through his body. She didn’t laugh much, especially once the Ark came down and the worst of their stint on earth began, but he feels the inhale and exhale of her breath on his neck, remembers it like it was yesterday that they were reunited.

She still gives him advice, in dreams. She talks to him, and most of his dreams with her are happy, even if they cause him to wake up nauseated.

When she is with him, it is good. When he forgets her, forgets to think _What would Clarke do_ , he hardly notices, until he imagines her swinging around, the fierce look on her face.

He always remembers the forgiveness she gave him, _you did good_ , and the trust she put in him, when she couldn’t put it in herself.

But then she slips through his fingers, for hours, days at a time, and he curls around Echo one night, Raven another, and sometimes he lies awake, breathing until he can fall asleep again.

He doesn’t have a partner up here, because they rely on each other too much. They are all interconnected, which makes it easy to detach, sometimes. It also makes him transparent, and he thinks everyone knows that his heart is still broken, even if he manages to love everyone on the ring; that’s just who he is. Nothing could change that, not even losing the person he was beginning to care for the most. ( _He found her just as frustrating as he cared for her, still can’t believe some days that she pointed a gun at him, but thinks of the times that she trusted him, put her faith in him, and it mends the lingering bitterness of those moments, even if it can’t heal the gaping wound at her loss_.)

Some days, it feels like he’s squeezed the life out of the memories he has of her; after multiple years, he has thought of them so often, recalled her touch so many times to comfort himself, that he can’t even remember if it was real.

The memories feel like they are turning to ash in his hands, starting to float away, and it makes his heart clench. He wants to still carry her heart, but he doesn’t know how long he can keep doing that, how long before she’s a distant memory, rather than the omnipresent person next to him.

\--

There are so many glitches, trying to get back. They are late, late, late, and he _knows_ Clarke isn’t there, but his sister hopefully is, and heaven knows who else.

He doesn’t want to tell Abby that her daughter didn’t make it, but he also can’t wish that Abby won’t be there. He wants someone to talk to about Clarke, someone who found her as frustrating and wonderful as he once did.

When they finally ( _finally_ ) get to the ground, where they can breathe real air again (and it’s not as good as last time; the scent of char is still in the air, and he knows from looking from high up above that the planet is _far_ from recovered), the first thing he sees is a flash of gold, and a gun. He thinks he’s hallucinating, because there’s no way. There is nothing, no one here, unless people from the bunker are greeting them, and it must be Niylah he’s looking at, or one of the other blondes that was chosen, or it’s just a flash of the light.

He forces himself to move only because he needs to know that it’s not real ( _there’s no way_ , he thinks, _it’s not possible_ ).

But there she is, gun up, hair shorter than he remembers, and she’s _right there in front of him_ , and all of a sudden, all he can think of are the days that he remembered her, felt her presence beside him, and he doesn’t know what to make of that, still thinks that could only have been an hallucination, but she’s not dead, and his heart is hammering in his chest, he’s stuck in place, and Monty and Harper and Raven have all run to greet her, the others walking in shock right behind them, but even as she hugs the others, her eyes are locked tight on his.

By the time everyone else has said their hellos, he can finally move his feet, and he reaches out a tentative hand to touch her arm, and she gives him a wobbly smile, and then it’s just like no time has passed, her nose buried in the crook of his neck, the smell of her hair a little different, but still _Clarke_ , and he can’t believe that this is possible, can’t believe that he’s this lucky ( _and it can only be luck_ , he thinks _, because nothing good has ever come of this planet, but she’s_ here _, she survived_ )..

There are years to catch up on, and things that need to get done immediately, but in this moment, he is wrapped up in this incredible person, this _survivor_ , and he thinks that his own survival is worth so much more than he could have imagined as a result, thinks that she’s been with him this whole way, whether she knew it or not, whether it was real or not, and it is everything to see her again.


End file.
